News
This is the News section of the website, it is forā¦ news. It includes an RSS feed that you can subscribe to so you donāt have to manually check. Correction, I thought it did, dunno what to do now.
Return!
So hey, itās been a while.
First things first, this is a bit strange no? A blog post, just outta the blue.
An explanation is probably needed then.
I donāt really like blogs1) but after some thinking, I figured it was a good idea going forward.
Some2), may have been concerned that the site was offline. Itās because of HelioHost and not on me3) actually and Iām really happy itās back online again.
So letās move on.
Redoing the site thing
I scrapped the main site4); it wasnāt being used and I wouldnāt have done much with it anyway5). After some thinking6) I realised I could have just used DokuWiki for everything I wanted on the main site anyway.
That being News7), stories8) andā¦ the rest I guess.
DokuWiki is really flexible so I can just move everything to here and keep the main page only.
Now that thereās a small explanationā¦
News or this blog thing
I said that Iād fix up the news section and add an RSS feed. There were several reasons this didnāt work out.
- Iām stupid and lazy
- By that I mean I couldnāt figure out how to do it in a āsimpleā and āelegantā fashion.
- Editing the pure HTML and RSS files would have been extremely painful.
- I have extreme difficulty committing to semi-regular updates
- Which would have been way worse if done through the pure method.
- An issue that will still plague this solution I imagine.
- I actually forgot the news section existed at all.
Stupid reasons definitely, but I found a solution - a DokuWiki plugin.
This plugin basically solves the issue of my stupidity, it handles the RSS part for me and I donāt have to edit pure HTML.
So What?
Now thereās a news section (This thing!), so people will know when I wrote a new article or whatever. I wonāt update it every single time I write a new article of course. It will likely be a weekly thing and will obviously contain more than just the articles I wrote over the past week.
I donāt do blogs or diaries so I donāt know if thisāll work out. I donāt even know if this is necessary, but I found people donāt know when I wrote something new or edited something9).
Okay, but what's the point?
Iām having difficulty grasping the point myself. But essentially, there are advantages to having a personal wiki and advantages to having a blog. Combining the two just seems logical, to take advantage of the advantages of both formats.
But to name some advantages in general:
- Personal Wiki
- More long term
- Information is interlinked more cleanly
- Blog
- More short term
- By this I mean that topics can be based more on what the writer is currently thinking about.10)
- People know when you update
- On a personal wiki, unless you specifically look for every new thing thereās no way to tell itās been updated.
Basically, Iāll use this place to mention some things that are on my mind but donāt exactly deserve a full article yet (it could be a teaser for things to come I guess). Also, when I mention something that has an articleā¦ I can just link to it, which is kinda convenient.
On top of site updates and the like.
Stories
So I wanna write some stuff eventually. I was gonna do this on the main site but yeahā¦
Instead, Iāll create a namespace (or 3) and just write them as articles or whatever. Iāll also mirror them on FF.net and AO3 where applicable.
The question you all have, of course, is if I have something - well kinda. Itās the first chapter of a fanfiction and maybe some worldbuilding stuff. Other than thatā¦ no.
The Other things
Same will apply to software and shite11). Iāll create special sections for them and yeah.
Okay, but what about the wiki? Have you been sitting on your ass this whole time?
( ;Ā“ā`)
Yes and no. I was sitting on my ass not doing anything, at first. Then the site was offline for way more time than I expected so I started putting some stuff together.
Iāll be adding more Key related stuff since Kazamatsuri shut down recently and I decided to steal some content from them.12)
Outside of their Key-related descriptions; I stole borrowed their aphorism and team name generators from them. Since we have no idea when theyāll go offline for real, I figured they wonāt mind if I take those. Iāll ask my JS friend (JS-kun) to help me improve them when we both have time. Iāll also try to translate them to other languages.
I fully realise that that isnāt wiki related so Iāll move on a littleā¦
At some point I said Iād create grammatical rules that Iād write all my articles in from now on - itās progressing a little. Iām about to get to fixing up the grammar for real, so itāll be doneā¦ eventually. Maybe once Iām done Iāll even rewrite this post in E7.
Iām also writing some things for other articles and I have new ideas for articles as well. So Iām gonna be adding those eventually.13)
Since I forgot what articles I hadnāt written yet on hereā¦ yeah those arenāt done yetā¦ but Iāll get to them.
Iām going to redo start because itās a bit dated and people will be confused when they see āwelcome to the wikiā after they expected aā¦ normal site.
Iāll also be redoing a few of the older articles to get them closer to my current writing style14). Specifically, Guide to Japanese Media, splicing and some shorter reviews.
Finally, Iāll be adding something I call Stuff I want to change but I have no idea how to approach yet. Itāll be a place where I list articles I want to rewrite but have no idea how to approach it yet.
So yeah, I havenāt been completely lazy during the off-time.
Other wiki things
I messed with the .htaccess and shite, so links will be prettier now (it also means that previous links will stop working haha).
More plugins were added, purely for aesthetics or to make some arbitrary things easier.
I decided to change the template from MonoBook to Newspaper. I never really liked MonoBook, it always felt a little off. To tell the truth, I only picked it for nostalgia. Considering this place is becoming more multipurpose and my writing style doesnāt exactly fit the āwiki lookā I changed it to this.
LoreBook articles15) will be moved to their own namespace Essarr LoreBook.
Since this process will take a while, I have no due date and no idea about anything.
Other ideas
I have other ideas, which, while I havenāt implemented, I may in the future.
First of all, articles available in multiple languages. Beyond simply boosting my ego16) there is a more normal reason. A lot of the people I know IRL donāt speak English as their first lingua, some donāt speak it at all. So I would like to write stuff in Czech for them as well17) but there are issues with this. I am shit at translating from English to Czech18) and I suck at Czech, so the process would be painful for me. I guess I could ask some of my friend folks to do it for me, but thatās kinda shit. Oh well, I aināt doing it for a while anyway.
Second, I thought of opening a BBS.19) Reasons for it are simple, basically to encourage discussion20) and thatās about it. I would of course be growing that e-peen a bit too much by that point, which is why I aināt doing it for a while.
Anything else?
I had uploaded a few vids to YT. So Iāll share them hereā¦
Iāll also be uploading more to there as well, because I feel like it.
Yeah, beyond that, not much I guess.
That's it
So yeah, for this update thatās all.
Next one next week or sooner, depending on when Iāll be done.
Let it Go Cover
Love Is An Open Door
Oh right, I recently watched two videos by uniquenameosaurus and my attitude towards copyright21) has changed. Iāll create an article about it at some point.